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I agree that the current state of Amazon's retail goods is not a monopoly. We will see if that remains true in 10 years.

Currently Microsoft does not have a monopoly on computer OS. They have practically no stake in mobile computers (smart phones). Mac has a decent share of desktop/laptop usage. Any claim that MacOS is "limiting in what programs it can run" is a 10 year old argument or so one sided (Windows is also limiting in what programs it can run....). The Microsoft of 20 years ago _did_ have a monopoly on computer OS.

If only there was something useful to this post... Maybe real examples of a single algorithm written in a minimum of two languages? Maybe an expanded view of greenhouse gas emissions resulting from running some code under different fuel mixtures (basically no one on earth is running code on 100% coal powered electricity). Some sort of meaningful analysis should exist.

No, GDAL is still the best. I also suspect you were doing something suboptimal. As far as modern wrappers for GDAL, `rasterio` is the most pythonic. Part of sgillies suite including shapely, rasterio, and fiona.

Though not the resolution of WorldView (~50 cm), Landsat 8 can get you 15 m resolution if you use pan sharpening. ESA's Sentinel 2 can get 10 m true-color natively. Both these are free to use and Landsat images are public domain. Copernicus data is copyright under ESA, but they are fairly permissive.

Over the US there is abundant true-color aerial imagery at resolutions of 1 meter that is freely available from USGS/USDA. I suspect there may be similar datasets over parts of Europe.

Not trying to say these will solve all the problems you mention or that scraping Google's tile server is specifically amoral, but the state of free satellite imagery is better than it has ever been (haven't even talked about weather satellites capturing images every 15 minutes!).

On the topic of defense contractors operating these high resolution satellites and not sharing the data -- It isn't really true that you have no way of utilizing these images. They are almost all available for purchase, albeit at a very steep price. If you are interested in the Arctic/Antarctic you can apply for free access to insane amounts of high-resolution data over the high latitudes. Granted this is probably not the area you are interested in. You can also apply for grants directly with Digital Globe if I remember correctly.

In many cases the satellite operators can't make every strip available because they are mission-oriented. Where the satellites are imaging can often be classified information. Recognize that these aren't civilian satellites. They are DoD contractors. Just because you can perceive the amount of data that exists by looking at Google Maps doesn't mean it is for you. Consider all the the National Geospatial Agency collects under funding from your taxes and the mere crumbs that ever get let through to the public.

I am all for citizen access to very high resolution satellite products, but from my experience it would be better to establish a new federal program that operates in that way. More stability in that sense and less potential for access to suddenly be revoked. If we can re-establish the mindset in DC that federally operated science programs and open data are beneficial to every american then we will be much better off in the long run.

I have thought about the impact that ubiquitous apps like Google Maps or Waze might have on the real world and people who aren't necessarily tapping into that space. It first came about when Google Maps directed me along a side street that paralleled a major thoroughfare. It was very residential, lots of stop signs and street parking, whereas the thoroughfare was all commercial with decent speed but some traffic lights. The residential route probably was marginally faster, but I took it at the expense of the residents who wanted/deserved a quiet and slow street. Could you imagine if suddenly the Google Maps algorithm decides that your quiet street is the best route to get across town? Now there are a thousand more cars and hurried ride shares traveling in front of your house, rolling through stop signs, all because an opaque and stoic algorithm has decided so. There is no social recourse. There is no support line. You can't go the the city council to get anything done about it. What a twist of fate.

Just to continue on...

With this setup you can have anything (ANYTHING!) powering the data side. From CSVs to any SQL server local or remote, directories of markdown files, directories of ZIP archives, random (or deterministic) numbers or generable sequences.

Flask gives you so much freedom with the backend implementation you can draw from anywhere. You just need to define the URL patterns and supply the functions that respond with HTML. Flask-Freeze then crawls your site (or a list of pages you specify) and renders the HTML with whatever function you supplied. Couldn't be easier to understand and it is unbelievably flexible.

In many of the physical sciences both Masters and PhD students are usually paid a living wage, do not pay tuition, and work double or triple duty as student, teacher, researcher. These students usually do not accrue additional debt beyond what was needed for their undergraduate degree (if any). Despite their importance to many parts of the university system such as instruction, research, and funding (NSF proposals that don't have explicit funding for grad students are D.O.A.), they can still be treated pretty unfairly. Given the hours they work, it is still most common for them to be on the books as part-time employees (0.49 full-time) which cuts off access to employee sponsored health care that is mandated under the ACA. In almost all cases they have no benefits outside of tuition payment.

I think grad students unionizing is a fantastic idea. They are in every way the critical grease that keeps the capitalistic university system running. They should be able to protect themselves and have a stronger impact in how the universities are run.

The only concern I have is the huge turnover. Unions are most effective and most rationale when the members are committed for life. The longest any of these students could be there is 15 years (5 masters, 10 PhD). This would be very extreme. Most are looking to be out in 2-6 years.

Are there any other examples of unions for occupations that have mandatory turnover or term limits?

In the physical sciences (soft sciences too, perhaps) NSF proposals that don't have explicit funding for graduate students are D.O.A.

If you want lots of customization and are friendly with Python I would suggest rolling your own project with Flask and Flask-Freeze. You get all the benefits of complete customization from URLs to templated pages and scripts. Really anything. While this isn't a canned solution, it is a really robust solution.

But going to w3schools is like trying to kill a fly with a flyswatter with a dashed red border of weight 2px. Their examples are so basic, pre-canned, and repetitious between pages that you rarely see useful options and intricacies that each tag/property may posses.

For super quick syntax checks ("Is it fill-opacity or opacity?") MDN might be a little overboard, but as any sort of reference beyond 3 line snippets it is the link that I always look for. I usually append MDN to the end of my searches for HTML/SVG help.

Twitter is also crawling with fun and light-hearted bots that are non-manipulative and generate content for others to consume. I would hate to see any of those bots get thrown off the platform.

Missing the important piece of a sound dampening room. Record in a closet with a bunch of clothes and the audio quality will be noticeably better than in your living room.

16:9 will never be retro. I personally like the new keyboard (T430-onwards) and while I enjoy the new ports, I will stick with purchasing 5 year old thinkpads on Ebay for under $150.

Absolutely. The longer I can avoid opening a GUI the better.

Ha! No.

What are the actual problems that your company is encountering? Bugs? Spaghetti? Unmaintainability?

The small negatives might also be for indexing from the end of lists. `my_list[-1]` is super common.

I have been enjoying using selenium as a programmatic interface with the browser. Hopefully more of that!

You can read more in this open-access PNAS article[0].

[0]http://www.pnas.org/content/105/24/8232.full

No, the area where the ice was recovered is near the Allan Hills of the Transantarctic Mountains. This area isn't in the center of the ice sheet, where consistent accumulation patterns exist and drilling from the surface to the deepest ice would yield ~500k of these annual layers. The Allan Hills are on the fringe of the ice sheet, where the rock beneath the ice rises and due to some of the dynamic deformation mechanisms (and strong surface ablation) old ice is forced towards the surface. The researchers therefore aren't drilling from modern ice to this ancient ice, but are instead tapping directly into the old ice which is now exposed near the ice sheet surface.

You have to be aware that many companies have field operations that require (in the US) very large insurance plans. A stipulation of many of these plans are that all employees must refrain from certain drugs. It is in these cases that what goes on outside of work can creep into the scope of the company. If you are getting high on the weekend and have an unrelated plane accident on Monday, the company's insurance might be able to claim breach of contract and not cover the accident.

I agree that Snapchat and IG are two different use cases. And I find myself annoyed at the constant stream of tech journos pushing the narrative of "there can only be one!". Email and SMS coexist in the same way that Snapchat and IG could coexist. I use each of these apps daily and for different reasons. Snap is probably way overvaluated currently, but that is a separate problem in my mind.

You can check the affiliate link in my blog for my amazon list of useful web monetization books.

I don't work for Planet but I know the doves have a space-looking camera that is used to help understand the satellite's orientation based on the location of stars in the image.

StackOverflow has monetized their community by providing a best-in-class service the community needs/uses (jobs).

Seems like there is lots of talk here about how this is thin wrapper over `subprocess`, but I like the idea. What I don't like is that the logo looks like a penis with a mustache.

Do you rent your computer/phone?

The damage of bringing a billion people electricity?

Isn't there an abundance of evidence that __any__ Facebook app is constantly recording you? I recall seeing that Facebook and the Facebook Messenger were...

https://landsatonaws.com has a nice interface I think.

API is https://landsatonaws.com/{path}/{row}/{scene}